Robert Kocik - The Poetry Project

Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking

Paul Volcker said since the time of Ho Chi Minh
no banking betterment but the ATM.

be being paid
pease porridge hot
be being paid
pease porridge cold
be being paid
pease porridge in the pot
be being paid
nine days old
be being paid
for rotting away
be reimbursed

The Dazzling Swamp

At this rate, it won’t take but
the time Lenape lived before
Verrazzano for the poor to
become one race, first of all.

What’s with the versus?
Runaway versus resident, melted pot versus melting pot,
abolition of white guilt versus elimination of wealth gap,
what’s with the versus, are you sure you’re sure about the versus?

You’re not exactly paying rent,
you’re adding to a foreign
superannuation fund, first of all.
Getting not exactly pushed out,
you’re being joint-ventured
or restructured, first of all.

What’s with the versus?
Black reparation versus all the poor, cash payout versus free school,
Manna-hata as it is versus a plot of land the size of one bull’s hide,
what’s with the versus, are you sure you’re sure about the versus?

It’s not exactly martial law
but also never not. First of all,
single-family-property vultures,
wealth management bilkers,
super-funded bulk purchasers,
nobody homes, nobody’s home—
diddling masters of higher-end
demand decimating hopes of first-
time buyer, toiling simpleton
fixer upper end-user first of all.

What’s with the versus?
My country versus duplicity, red recompense versus rent as theft,
hardscrabble versus windfall, licit versus beneficent,
what’s with the versus, are you sure you’re sure about the versus?

Top-dollared investor flimflammer
male-market hornswoggler with
military backup toppling the dollar
of necessitous poor, fleeced peon
undocumented bohunk drudge.
Overseer development vehicles
riding roughshod over Outlier
vegetable patch, first of all.

What’s with the versus?
hush money versus income, vulnerable versus invaluable,
de facto versus official, feeling supreme versus proof of inferiority,
what’s with the versus, are your sure you’re sure about the versus?

Is that wealth concentration or
is it racial elimination, Johnny-
come-lately in the gated Runaway
encampment? It’s a test question,
movable chattel, you brought the
hounds after you. Wellbeing will be
our weapon of peace, first of all.

What’s with the versus?
Late New Netherland versus Early Maroonage, impalpable versus property,
phenomena versus perfect, inalienable versus unalienable,
what’s with the versus, are you sure you’re sure about the versus?

Nieuwe wereldters, first stepper
on the belonged and unowned,
first of all, fair is not fair, just as
money has taken something for
nothing and must now give away,
fair is not fair because it’s never
fair enough, until fair is one
giving up one’s advantage for
another, whether from surplus
or scarcity, not ignobly small-
mindedly but unduly, first of all,
nobody-on-top-cracy, fucking
impossibly in the united swamps
of alterity, fair not fair because
fair’s not trust enough, first of all.

What’s with the versus?
Unsown versus fullgrown, steam versus spirit, all versus wherewithal—
and what’s with this opposition as opposed to, versus versus versus?

from The Ubiquitous Dividend

(LUDDITE INNER ENERGY CORNUCOPIAN)

Name one crime we can’t credit to our ignorance of the ubiquitous dividend.
Name one wrong that would have won out had we but tended, implemented…
name once scourge, one burden, curse or blow…had we but basked in the ubiquitous dividend.

That taxation would be a less preposterous public income than pre-distributive munificence or a fully nationalized finance sector is itself preposterous.

Check out 1948 post-civil war to 1982 World Bank-penetrated Costa Rica: without a natural resource, from poorest to richest nation in Latin America. With its 4 remaining state banks—still considered the happiest place on earth.

The largest stock owner in Europe is Norway’s Government Pension Fund, deriving its financial backing not from potential pensioners paying in, but from the county’s petroleum sector profits. Norway’s pension fund, three times the size of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, is so powerful, its shareholding so ethical and activist, that it can pressure global corporations even entire countries, to ban munitions production or comply with human rights, labor and environmental standards. This is yet stock-market-money—retirement, disability, health and death benefits flow not as photons but oil.

With as much energy as has been poured into debt acquisition, to together glorify and grovel in the unsolved.

Democracy preserves privacy and privacy is for calibrating the dissolution of identity learned with others. I’m your cottage—for recovering from and refining the shock of rotting away.

(Like my private convictions, individualized happiness is incoherent.)

Let only the Federal Reserve function as an investment bank, its profits, as always, flowing to the U.S. Treasury, itself already acting as the lone financial management firm and proprietary trader allowed by law—all headed by the photosynthetic.

Let’s back up. Slow down.

Does the ubiquitous dividend even exist? Paid back by “whom” and having paid into “what”? Are there conditions supporting its existence. Do we need to be predisposed in order to benefit? Can I, from this point, actually mark the steps that lead to generosity as intrinsic? I am certain that it’s intrinsic, and this certainty is my blindness. I also want it to be intrinsic, which adds to the confusion. “Intrinsic” itself adds to the confusion. Remove the preference, remove the predisposition, remove the law, remove the right, remove even impulse and above all remove the intrinsic-ness—and what’s left is the ubiquitous.

Back to the problem at hand: productivity in the phenomenal world—intrinsic-ness as mode of distribution.

That which remains—after all the conceit is removed—which has been, for two thousand years, essentialized as “love”—what must it now be known as to aid what’s ailing us—our poetics taken as a whole in which we do not industriously delight in the good fortune of others nor delay delight until all are safe and sound?

Can that which remains—the ubiquitous dividend so named—spare us the next thousand years of realisms, reward-circuitries and reversions to subsistence?

Drop all practices and wait spellbound in the helplessness of having become the power of all manifestation.

Just as no one should deserve to be generous, no one should be left without the means for being so.

Practically speaking, a dividend that’s ubiquitous can only flow from an infinite source.

Instate ubiquity—leave payout ratios to recipients, not managers and donors—the way leaves absorb only so much energy from the sun. In response, the sun will continue to retain only the energy it requires to maintain its optimal level of radiation, without profit.

We don’t even need models or metaphors—natural or manufactured—for arriving at a mature economy. We only need to stand face to face with “opportunity” and recover it from conquest, from having brought out the worst in us all.

(EORTHE) (CHURLISH)

Do you have to think about taking your hand out of a fire?

Insecurity is intrinsic.

Justice blames individuals, not itself, and so is not intrinsic.

What is there to justify other than rotting tissue?

A right as something fought for is, apparently, not inherent.

Worst of all, justice creates people who are justified.
Tension in the body agrees with autocracy of ego.